Field of Application
The present invention relates to an apparatus for generating a travel path for a vehicle. In particular the invention relates to an apparatus which generates a travel path that can be traveled over by smoothly varying the vehicle steering, while avoiding obstacles, but which requires only extremely small amounts of computation.
Description of Related Art
Technology has been proposed hitherto, for example as described in Japanese Patent Publication No. 2006-154967 (page 12, FIG. 11) for an apparatus whereby the travel path of a vehicle is laid out on a grid, formed of equidistant lines arrayed in X and Y directions. Specifically, a plurality of possible travel paths are calculated, and the path having minimum risk is then calculated.
However with such an apparatus, in order to avoid obstacles while performing smooth steering of the vehicle, it is necessary to make the grid extremely detailed, with very small spacings between the grid lines. As a result, large amounts of computation are required, so that a large-scale data processing apparatus is required and computation times become long.